Scenes in the trial of Percy Lefroy Mapleton at Maidstone Assizes for murder of Isaac Gold on the London-Brighton railway. Wood engraving, 1881.

"The Brighton railway murder. The trial of Percy Lefroy Mapleton for the murder of Mr. Gold has ended, as most people who had paid any attention to the case expected, in a verdict of guilty, and the wretched man now lies under sentence of death. The various points in the evidence, and the incidents of the hearing have been so fully reported, and we doubt not so widely read, that recapitulation is needless. The array of incriminating facts was so overwhelming that even Mr. Montagu Williams, with all his ingenuity and magnificent audacity, failed to affect the opinion of the jury, although the eloquent pathos of his peroration caused some of them to shed tears. The single solitary item in favour of the prisoner was the declaration by Mr. and Mrs. Clayton that he stayed at home at Wallington all day on the 21st of June, the date on which the revolver was pawned, a statement which, as Lord Coleridge remarked in his summingup, "might be true, but was very difficult to believe" when considered in connection with the inadequate reasons given by them for withholding it so long, and the opposing evidence of other witnesses. Lord Coleridge's impartial and unimpassioned summing-up was a remarkable contrast to the powerfully dramatic speech for the defence--a lucid marshalling of all the items of evidence, with terse pungent criticism thereupon, which point by point exposed the utter baselessness of the theory for the defence. The general opinion of the Press and of the outside public seems to coincide with the finding of the jury, and the fact that they were only absent from Court about ten minutes is sufficient to show that they saw no reason for hesitation. The outward calmness of the prisoner, though well-preserved throughout the trial, was manifestly assumed, and his melodramatic declaration to the jury after sentence had been passed deserves, and will probably receive, very little attention. The immense interest taken in the trial, not only by the people who thronged the court but by the public generally, was perhaps the outcome of something more than morbid curiosity, the crime having been committed under such circumstances as would naturally tend to excite alarm and apprehension amid all classes of society."--The graphic, loc. cit.